Origins
A SHEFFIELD STORY
Our origins
IAM Cloud was started, quite literally, in a garage in Sheffield.
Adam, our CEO, was working as a consultant when he had a bolt of inspiration for a wholly cloud-based identity management platform. He pitched his idea to his employer , a specialist in identity management services, and while they liked the concept, they felt that having their own platform would create a conflict of interest.
Adam was convinced though. He saw great potential, enough potential, even, to take the gamble to leave his successful job and venture into the unknown to start his own company. A few of his colleagues saw the vision too, and joined him for the ride.
Adam started feverishly working on his creation at home, in his garage-turned-office.
Going from idea to POC to actual sellable product had its challenges though. One in particular: no one had any money. So, to stand even a remote chance of keeping things going while the new platform could be built, the team would need to continue doing consulting for the time being. And that they did.
Around this time, just as IAM Cloud was being launched, Adam met Leon, now COO, at a party in Sheffield. Leon and Adam hit it off right away. Leon had more of a business and marketing background and had just finished an MBA, but he was also a lifelong techy and had taught himself to code in the 90s as a teenager. Leon immediately saw the vision too, and joined a few months later.
And initially things went really well. Growth was exponential, and we won a series of awards including a major one from Microsoft. But despite that, for some time in the early years a tension grew between the early consultants and the product teams. For the consultants, consulting was a way of life; whereas to the software team, the product was the goal, and consulting was a means to get there.
The period of 2016–2020 can be best thought of as the IAM Cloud Dark Ages, a time where from the outside in, precious little seemed to be happening, but where on the inside, with our heads down, we grafted and grafted and grafted some more. We set in place the foundations on which the rest of our history would be built.
Unlike Leon, Adam is not a native Sheffielder, and indeed on the surface the pair differ quite a bit. But Adam, Leon and Sheffield all deep down have a lot in common: industry, innovation, graft, resilience and broad-set shoulders for taking on big challenges and responsibilities. They also share simple working-class backgrounds, and they all wear those origins with pride.
IAM Cloud today
Today IAM Cloud is a much more international company, or indeed technically five companies. We have colleagues in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Czechia, Germany, Poland, the United States, Argentina and Australia. But Sheffield still remains at the company's roots, both literally and in spirit.
Curious about the virtual world you keep seeing in our videos?
The animated cityscape that runs through our recent product videos is a stylised take on Sheffield itself, the cooling towers, the steelworks, the Peaks. It's a love letter to where we came from, baked into how we present what we do.